GOP, the Party of Bad Ideas

This week’s big Republican lie, as relayed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

“We are the party of ideas, and the Democrats have none.”

First of all, Republicans have many abysmal, disastrous ideas, as the last five years have demonstrated.

Secondly, Democrats have plenty of excellent ideas--universal health care, putting the environment and the public ahead of corporate greed, staffing Washington with experts rather than cronies, focusing on security here at home before starting wars abroad, taxing the rich to pay for Bush's excesses--but the Republicans don’t dare address those ideas in a public forum, because their ideas are so battered. Better to smear and sloganeer, which has worked well for them in the recent past. Too bad the real world is dynamic, rather than the static fantasy many fearful conservatives wish it were.

And yet another example of Republican failure and deception--Operation Swarmer, a massive airborne assault which kicked off in Iraq today. Several conclusions can be drawn from it:

The situation in Iraq is still grave and out-of-control.

The Iraqi security forces are still pitifully unprepared to take over from U.S. troops.

The president continues to state that our goal in Iraq is “Victory,” whatever the hell that means. The early definitions of victory--an American style democracy in a safe and stable Iraq--have vanished like so many wisps of Marijuana smoke.

But Bush and the hapless Donald Rumsfeld, using a flood of harsh post-invasion rhetoric about “staying the course” instead of "cutting and running" or “timetables embolden the enemy,” have painted themselves into corner. At this point, the best course of action would be to set a deadline for withdrawal and stick to it, but Bush would look like the idiot he claimed all his opponents were when they proposed such tactics in the past.

As in so many other instances, the Bush sin is Pride. He and his team simply cannot change their course because they have been so rigid and absolutist in their rhetoric. They will do anything not to change their minds, which, in their view of the world, makes them seem weak. So “strong and resolute” has become “strong and wrong.”

We could use a lot less muscle in the White House, and a lot more brains. Time to let the party with good ideas take a turn.